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      Is This Maternity Hospital Haunted, or Is It All a Pregnant Metaphor?

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      In Clare Beams’s eerie new novel, “The Garden,” nefarious things are afoot.THE GARDEN, by Clare BeamsIrene Willard is a midcentury American woman with a history of miscarriages and a husband who is eager to start a family. Still childless, now pregnant for the sixth time, Irene dutifully packs herself off to an isolated ancestral estate that has been repurposed by a husband-and-wife medical team into a care center for high-risk pregnancies. This place is more haunted manse than hospital. The doctors are prone to say things like “now for your first injection” — and they won’t take no for an answer. Small indefinable living things skitter in the shadowed corners of the rooms. And: There is a neglected garden out back that has the power to bring dead things back to life.With such a richly gothic setup, you might forgive me for thinking “The Garden” was about to deliver some blood-splattery fun and maybe even some zombie babies by the end. But that is not this book — or at least, that is not the whole story. Tucked inside this story’s gothic envelope is a tale inspired by a horrific chapter in the history of obstetric medicine.“The earliest whisper of ‘The Garden’ came to me in the history of diethylstilbestrol” (or DES), Beams writes in her acknowledgments. “That drug’s story … set mine in motion.” A synthetic estrogen that was prescribed for decades to prevent miscarriage, DES did nothing to prevent miscarriage; what it did instead was cause cancers, infertility and birth defects. How could such a medical tragedy have continued for so long? Beams borrows facts from history to fashion an answer to that question in the guise of a horror story.Irene is savvy and skeptical and she has doubts from the beginning about the hospital and its so-called state-of-the-art treatments. But her fear of triggering another miscarriage keeps her paralyzed and compliant: She “would never go home by choice to wait for the wave, the streak, the clot, the pool, the groan, the clench, the seep, the first slight cramp, each moment a terrible balance of hoping and dreading, listening and trying not to listen, feeling and trying not to feel.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leigh Bardugo’s Latest Travels to Renaissance Spain

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      In “The Familiar,” the blockbuster fantasist conjures a world of mystical intrigue and romance.THE FAMILIAR, by Leigh BardugoFor those unacquainted with Catholic demonology, a familiar, or “familiar spirit,” as the phrase shows up in the Bible, is an otherworldly creature indentured to a master, usually whoever’s summoned it — a witch or necromancer or, in the case of Aladdin, a lucky rube who finds a bottle in need of a shine.In Leigh Bardugo’s richly drawn novel of magic and eternal love “The Familiar,” the Aladdin of the story is Luzia, a scullion girl working for fallen nobility in 16th-century Spain. Spells and enchantments come to Luzia with ease, initially manifesting as small remedies to household gaffes: A burned loaf of bread is suddenly edible; a ripped seam repairs itself. She’s wildly gifted, but has little control of her abilities.Enter Guillén Santángel, a familiar bound to serve Victor de Paredes, an ambitious tradesman known throughout Madrid for his astonishing luck. The de Paredes family has owned Santángel for three generations, employing him as an invaluable henchman, fixer and bringer of otherworldly good fortune. Known as El Alacrán, the scorpion, Santángel is an indomitable force with a voice like “ashes gone cold” who looks “at once beautiful and like he was dying, as if a sheet had been laid over a particularly handsome corpse.” When de Parades selects Luzia to compete as his “holy champion” in a torneo of magic at the luxurious La Casilla, a contest with life-or-death stakes, Santángel is enlisted to guide her. In the process, he becomes her protector, mentor and friend.Luzia, described by one character as a wolf who has “taken the shape of a girl,” makes for an unlikely sorceress. She lacks formal education, and is as ignorant of her potential as she is of her origins. Luzia’s ancestors were, it turns out, conversos, Jews forced to convert to Catholicism but still considered “the embodiment of everything the Inquisition reviled.” Although her parents are dead, Luzia’s aunt has taught her the “precious, perilous scraps of language” that form the basis of her spells, a music she hears but doesn’t fully understand. At La Casilla, Luzia must hide her origins and her intelligence. She dresses with prim severity in a plain black dress and a white ruff like a Renaissance-era Coco Chanel, hoping to seem less threatening. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Novels About Uncomfortably Close Families

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      People cross boundaries in Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Spell” and Penelope Lively’s “The Photograph.”Should you feel like a creep reading about transgressive family affairs on the subway?Librado Romero/The New York TimesDear readers,“My sister. My daughter. … She’s my sister and my daughter!” If you’ve ever seen Roman Polanski’s sun-bleached neo-noir “Chinatown,” which turns 50 this year, you can’t forget it: a defiant, tear-stained Faye Dunaway wailing the sordid secret of her troubled-heiress character’s life while Jack Nicholson’s flinty detective Jake Gittes slaps her halfway to next Saturday.I thought of that scene again recently after reading a much-passed-around piece in The Atlantic about the surprising prevalence of incest that has been exposed by test results from popular ancestry sites like 23AndMe. And I felt smugly justified in never getting around to swabbing myself with one of the two DNA kits, still languishing somewhere at home in a junk drawer, that I’d received as thoughtful but vaguely terrifying gifts. Better, perhaps, to never know that you are 6.7 percent Slavic highlander, and also that your great-uncle is actually your grandpa.The two books in this week’s column are not about that sort of flowers-in-the-attic depravity (or even the highbrow provocation of literary fire-starters like Kathryn Harrison’s fevered 1997 memoir “The Kiss”). But they do cast a sometimes-discomfiting eye on blood ties: tales of romance and longing that transgress most good people’s idea of familial propriety, and sometimes cross much starker lines. Should you feel like a creep reading these on the subway? Forget it, Jake; it’s fiction.—Leah“The Spell,” by Alan HollinghurstFiction, 1998We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Barth, a Novelist Who Found Possibility in a ‘Used-Up’ Form

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      By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.Nobody likes the comic who explains his own material, but the writer John Barth, who died on Tuesday, had a way of making explanations — of gags, of stories, of the whole creative enterprise — sing louder and funnier and truer than punchlines. The maxim “Show, don’t tell” had little purchase with him. In novels, short stories and essays, through an astoundingly prolific six-decade career, he ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them.He was styled a postmodernist, an awkwardly fitting title that only just managed to cover his essential attributes, like a swimsuit left too long in the dryer. But it meant that much of what Barth was doing — cheekily recycling dusty forms, shining klieg lights on the artificiality of art, turning the tyranny of plot against itself — had a name, a movement.For many years, starting in the 1960s, he was at the vanguard of this movement, alongside writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. He declared that all paths for the novel had already been taken, and then blazed new ones for generations of awe-struck followers. He showed us how writing works by letting us peer into its machinery, and reminded us that our experience of the world will always be dictated by the instruments we have to observe and record it. While never abandoning narrative, he found endless joy in picking apart its elements, and in the process helped define a postwar American style.Were Barth the author of this article, for example, he might pause here to point out that the lines above constitute what journalists like to call the nut graf, an early paragraph that provides larger context for the topic at hand and tries to establish its importance — and is sometimes wedged in last-minute by a harried writer or editor ordered to “elevate” a story or “give it sweep.” Then Barth might explain why this one is lousy, why the whole business of nut grafs is more or less absurd.The constructive disruption, the literary public service announcement: It became something of a signature for Barth, and it’s best expressed in his story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). The title piece, a masterwork of metafiction, follows a teenage boy lurching about the revolving discs and mirrored walls of an amusement-park fun house, where he realizes, dolefully, that he is better suited to construct such contrivances than experience them.Throughout, a comically pedantic narrator critiques the very tale he’s telling by identifying the flashy tricks of the “funhouse” that is fiction: symbolism, theme, sensory detail, resolution. The story is simultaneously a rigorous analysis, vivid example and ruthless dismantling of how literature operates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Don Winslow Is Ready to Trade His Pen for a Protest Sign

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      “City in Ruins” is the third novel in Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism.Like the cops, crooks and gangland toughs who populate his books, Don Winslow has something of a street fighter’s mentality.Growing up in Rhode Island during the New England gang wars of the 1960s, local mafia types were part of the fabric of his childhood. After college, while working as a private investigator in New York City, one of his jobs was to act as bait for potential muggers — then fend for himself until a larger associate could step in, “hopefully before I got too beat up,” he said.Winslow’s familiarity with the grittier side of life has served him well. Over a 33-year span he’s published more than 20 crime fiction novels, many of which have become best sellers or been adapted for film and TV.Now, he’s turning his attention to “something that feels heavier,” he said. “City in Ruins,” the third book in Winslow’s sweeping Danny Ryan trilogy, which casts an Irish mobster as a modern-day Aeneas and draws inspiration from events that led to the Boston Irish Gang War, will be his last novel. He said he’s retiring from publishing in part so he can put more energy into political activism.Since the 2020 presidential campaign, Winslow and Shane Salerno, a screenwriter, have together produced a series of highly combative videos and social media posts excoriating former President Donald Trump as, among other things, a “con man” and a “pathetic, broken little boy” (all told, the videos have received hundreds of millions of views.)“There’s no way I can reach that many people with a novel,” Winslow said. “And the novels take so much time, in an era where really what is needed are much faster responses.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Recognize the Locations Described in These Poems?

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      In 1914, Carl Sandburg published a poem that began:Hog Butcher for the World,Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;Stormy, husky, brawling,City of the Big Shoulders:What is the name of the city in the poem? (Hint: Despite having sports-team mascots that include Bulls and Bears, this city is not the high-finance capital of New York.) More

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      Molly on Philosophy for Kids and British Suspense for Adults

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      Jean-Luc Nancy’s “God, Justice, Love, Beauty”; Barbara Vine’s “A Dark-Adapted Eye”Hans MemlingDear readers,Happy Saturday. Today I pop in with two book recommendations — we’re visiting the philosophy and suspense aisles — and a quick personal note, which is that I am expecting a baby soon. (I mean, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but all signs do point to “impending baby”…)If all goes well, I’ll be off the newsletter beat for a couple of months while conducting field studies in child husbandry. Recommendations will continue to be furnished by the gang of well-read colleagues you’ve come to know and love.See you on the other side.—Molly“God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues,” by Jean-Luc Nancy; translated by Sarah CliftNonfiction, 2011How does one discuss philosophy with children? Midway through the first of four lectures in Jean-Luc Nancy’s book, a reader begins to suspect that the answer is: a lot more easily than with adults. Beginning in the early 2000s Nancy, a French philosopher, embarked on a project of “little dialogues” in which he delivered thoughts on Big Topics — love, God, justice, beauty — to an audience of schoolchildren. Each presentation was followed by a Q. and A. where the students posed questions to Nancy about his ideas; these exchanges are included in the volume and are its true joy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard Removes Binding of Human Skin From Book in Its Library

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      The decision to find a “respectful final disposition” for human remains used for a 19th-century book comes amid growing scrutiny of their presence in museum collections.Of the roughly 20 million books in Harvard University’s libraries, one has long exerted a unique dark fascination, not for its contents, but for the material it was reputedly bound in: human skin.For years, the volume — a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul — was brought out for show and tell, and sometimes, according to library lore, used to haze new employees. In 2014, the university drew jokey news coverage around the world with the announcement that it had used new technology to confirm that the binding was in fact human skin.But on Wednesday, after years of criticism and debate, the university announced that it had removed the binding and would be exploring options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.”“After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” the university said in a statement.Harvard also said that its own handling of the book, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls,” had failed to live up to the “ethical standards” of care, and had sometimes used an inappropriately “sensationalistic, morbid and humorous tone” in publicizing it.The library apologized, saying that it had “further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More